“Outside Elements”:
The Nationality and Statelessness of Nomadic
Peoples
Case Study III: The Bajau Laut of Malaysia
Heather Alexander
CONTENTS
I INTRODUCTION 2
II The Bajau Laut 4
II.A Boat Nomadism...5 II.B The Bajau Laut and Territory 5 II.C The Bajau Laut and
Belong-ing durBelong-ing the Sulu Sultanate 5
III The Colonial Period 7
III-A Borders and Sovereignty . . 11 III-B Consolidating
the British
Malay World...12 III-C Economic Development and
Settlement...12
IV ”Indigenous” and ”Immigrant”:
Race, Ethnicity, Religion and Belonging in
Malaysia 13
IV-A Immigration and the Inven-tion of ”Race” in Malaysia . 14 B ”Indigenous” in Malaysia . . 16 IV-C The Laws Protecting
Indige-nous and Aboriginal Peo-ples in Malaysia...16 IV.D ”Indigenous” and ”Immi-
grant” in Malaysia Today . . 17
IV.E Ethnicity and Immigration in Sabah...18
V The Malaysian Federation:
National-ity Law, Statelessness and Registration 18
V.E Nationality, Voting and Im-
migration in Malaysia Today 23 V.F Registration, Identity Docu-
ments and Irregular Migration 24 V-F.1 Registration
and Identity Documents
Issued by Malaysia 25 V-F.2 Irregular
Immigration, Documents and Identity in Sabah 26 V-G Sovereignty, Borders and
Natural Resources...29 V-G.1 Borders and
Sovereignty . . . 30 V-G.2 Oil and Gas in
Sabah...32 V-G.3 Oil and Gas,
Borders and Sovereignty . . . 33
VI The Bajau Laut Today 34
VI.A Missing the ”Window”: Ba-jau Laut and Registration at Independence...36 VI.B Immigration and ”Security”
in Sabah Today...36 VI.C The Bajau Laut, Security
and Immigration...37 VI.D The Bajau Laut and Docu-
mentation...38 VI.E Responses to Statelessness:
Assimilation and Settlement 39 VI.F Borders, Natural Resources
and Conservation...42
VII Conclusion 44
VIII Maps 45
VIII.A Map of ”Sea Nomad” Ar-eas: Moken (blue), Orang Suku Laut (orange) and Ba-jau Laut (green)...45 VIII.B Map of the British North
Borneo Company...45 VIII.C Map of the Area Currently
Claimed by the Sulu Sultanate 45
VIII.D Philippine and Malaysian Oil and Gas Exploration . . 45 VIII-E Disputed Border Claims . . . 45
D.I. INTRODUCTION
The Bajau Laut are a nomadic group who have lived for centuries in the Celebes and Sulu Seas between the southern Philippines and the island of Borneo, now split between Sabah, Malaysia, and Kalimantan, Indonesia.1 Despite living in the region for centuries, today many Bajau Laut are considered foreigners in Malaysia; outsiders and pariahs. Many Bajau Laut in Malaysia are state-less, lacking identity documents and subject to deportation. In particular, the Bajau Laut are fre-quently lumped together with immigrants from the Philippines, part of the ”crisis” of irregular migration in Sabah that has become one of the leading political issues of the day. The Bajau Laut are also viewed as suspect in the ongoing tensions over sovereignty and borders between Malaysia and her neighbors. In this Case Study, I discuss the root causes of statelessness among the Bajau Laut.
The Bajau Laut’s ”outsider” status is rooted in their history of nomadism and their ”traumatic experience of adjustment to a sedentary way of life has been shared almost universally by other no- madic peoples in the path of colonial expansion.”2 Since the colonial period, the Bajau Laut have come to be associated with piracy and criminality, their nomadism a threat to security in a sensitive border region, and lacking in a ”fixed attachment” to territory or a homeland.3 As Chao puts it, ”sea nomads” are thought of by governments as
1Helen Brunt, The Vulnerability of Bajau Laut (Sama Dilaut)
Children in Sabah, Malaysia Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network (2015) 3. The ”sea nomads” of southeast Asia can be divided into three main groups: the Moken of Thailand/Burma, the Bajau Laut of Malaysia/Philippines and the Orang Suku Laut of Indonesia. Lioba Lenhart, ”Recent research on Southeast Asian sea nomads” 36 and 37 Nomadic Peoples 245 (1995) 246.
2Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 109. 3Cynthia Chao, The Orang Suku Laut of Riau, Indonesia: The
”wanderers” and ”strangers”, incapable of forming the sort of attachments necessary for belonging to a nation-state.4 Various governments, beginning with the British and continuing with the governments of Malaysia and of Sabah, have tried alternatively to settle the Bajau Laut or deport them as foreigners in an attempt to eliminate nomadism.
The experience of the Bajau Laut in Malaysia mirrors that of other sea nomadic groups in the Philippines and Thailand. Few Bajau Laut re-main nomadic today, as most have succumbed to the pressures of modernization and coercive and forced settlement in an attempt to gain nationality and recognition of their rights.5 In some cases, settlement and assimilation, such as conversion to Islam, has led to the Bajau Laut being recog-nized as nationals. For many Bajau Laut, how-ever, particularly those who have settled more re-cently, nationality is unattainable because they lack documents, often going back decades to colonial independence and the introduction of Malaysian nationality.
Since the 1970s, Malaysia has enjoyed steady economic growth, despite the financial downturn in the 1990s, and relative political stability.6 Malaysia is now a destination country for immigrants and an economic powerhouse in the region.7 Much of the wealth comes from oil and gas discovered off shore of Sabah, making the traditional territories of the Bajau Laut some of the most valuable territory in the world. At the same time, the coral reefs and unique ecosystems of Borneo have made it a major tourist destination.
”(T)he land, resources and cultures
4Cynthia Chao, in Customary Strangers: New Perspectives on
Peripatetic Peoples in the Middle edited by Joseph C. Berland, Aparna Rao 324.
5In the Philippines, the previously nomadic Sama Dilaut are
now almost entirely settled by the government in ”Bajau villages.” During the Moro civil war, many relocated and settled in Sabah. Francis C. Jumala, From Moorage to Village: A Glimpse of the Changing Lives of the Sama Dilaut 39 Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society (2011), pp. 87-131.
6Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 6.
7
Kaur calls Malaysia ”the largest labour-importing country in southeast Asia. Amarjit Kaur, Refugees and Refugee Policy in Malaysia, (2014) 81. See also Azizah Kassim and Ragayah Haji Mat Zin, Policy on Irregular Migrants in Malaysia: An Analysis of its Implementation and Effectiveness (Philippine Institute for Development Studies 2011) 16.
of once peripheral zones of the re-gion have become hotly contested political territory, with levels of en-vironmental stress and degradation showing signs of crisis.”8
Yet prosperity has eluded the Bajau Laut, even as they abandon their traditional lifestyle in an attempt to be included in the new states in which they find themselves. The Bajau Laut, like many nomads, have struggled to keep their identity in the new world of nation-states that has grown up around them. As Farish Noor puts it in his blog post on identity and the nation-state in southeast Asia,
”(c)ategories like ’citizen’ and ’for-eigner’ are modern labels that we, Southeast Asians, have inherited from our colonial past...On the one hand we still retain the residual traces of our primordial roots to land and sea that tell us that this region is our shared home. But we also happen to be modern citizen-subjects living under the modern regime of the racial census, the identity card, the passport and the national flag.”9
8Hirsch, Philip, Warren, Carol, Politics of the Environment in
Southeast Asia (Routledge 1998) 13.
9Farish A. Noor, Associate Professor, S. Rajaratnam School of
D.II. THE BAJAU LAUT
The Bajau Laut, also known as the Sama Di-laut, are a boat-dwelling, nomadic people.10 There is evidence of sea nomadism off the coast of what is now Sabah going back as far as 3,000 years.11 The Bajau Laut traditionally live almost entirely on boats, coming to shore only to trade sea products and collect fresh water.12 Today, only a small minority of Bajau Laut continue to practice nomadism. In Sabah, most Bajau Laut have settled on islands such as Pulau Bum Bum or in pile- house villages, such as Bangau Bangau village off the coast of Semporna town.13 Traditionally, Bajau Laut migration followed a seasonal pattern, with boats travelling to northern Borneo in the early part of the year.14
In 2002, anthropologist Clifford Sather pub-lished an article in the journal Nomadic Peoples
stating that there were only a few thousand Bajau Laut still practicing nomadism in Sabah.15 To-day, the number is much smaller, probably ap-proaching zero.16 Sather describes the Bajau Laut as a ”small seafaring minority within a larger Sama/Bajau speaking population,” meaning that the primary difference between the Bajau Laut and the Bajau Darat, or land Bajau people, is the
10Clifford Sather, ”Comodity, Trade, Gift Exchange, and the
History of Maritime Nomadism in Southeastern Sabah” 6 Nomadic Peoples 20 (2002) 20; Carol Warren, ”Consciousness in Social Transformation: The Bajau Laut of East Malaysia” 5 Dialectical Anthropology 227 (1980), 227. See also the Encyclopedia Britanica online at http://www.britannica.com/topic/Sama-people (accessed October 2015). The term ”bajau laut” is used to distinguish nomadic bajau from the ”bajau darat”, or settled bajau, nomadism being the primary difference between the bajau laut and the much larger populations of bajau peoples living on land. Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut; Adaptation, History, and Fate in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah Oxford U. Press, Oxford, Singapore, New York, 1997 8. Some anthropologists do not like to use the term ”nomadic” for the Bajau Laut, because ”nomadic” implies pastoral nomadism. I use the term here for convenience. Lioba Lenhart, ”Recent research on Southeast Asian sea nomads” 36/37 Nomadic Peoples 245 (1995) 245. While the Bajau Laut refer to themselves by a number of different names, I will use the term ”Bajau Laut” as this is a term commonly employed by researchers. Sather, ”Commodity” 24.
11Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 14.
12Sather, ”Commodity” 23; C. Warren ”Consciousness” 227-228. 13
Ali 159.
14Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company”
65-66.
15Sather, ”Commodity” 23.
16current nomadic bajau population.
former’s nomadism.17 Warren describes Bajau Laut society as ”sub-nuclear”, meaning that it is not centralized, but has a relationship with another, more centralized society.18 The Bajau Laut have always been treated as a group apart from the land-based peoples they live among, occupying the ”periphery” and often looked down upon as a ”pariah people”, despite their recent attempts to assimilate by settling and converting to Islam.19 Indeed, as Sather points out, the land-based peo-ples of Borneo were forever trying to ”explain” the Bajau Laut, giving rise to several origin myths of the Bajau Laut as a group who had been cast out of Islam and regular society.20
Today, many Sabahans consider the Bajau Laut to have ”originated” in the Philippines, despite the presence of Bajau Laut in Sabah for thousands of years. In the words of one participant in a workshop in Sabah on the issue of conservation, ”The Sama Dilaut are not original people of Sabah. They are from the Philippines...They must learn about religion, education and living in a house.”21 In the eyes of many Malaysians, the Bajau Laut are a ”marginal group” of ”questionable origin.”22 In this case study, I explore the intersection between the nomadism of the Bajau Laut and their exclusion and statelessness, looking at their status from the pre-colonial period until the present day. In particular, I will focus on how the establishment of the present day borders between Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia has affected the Bajau Laut, as they have become caught up in Malaysia’s concerns regarding its border security and sovereignty over territorial waters and the resources contained within and beneath the ocean. In both their way of life and their outsider status, the Bajau Laut are similar to other sea nomad ethnic groups including the Moken in Thailand and
17Sather, ”Commodity” 23. See also 18
Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 109.
19Sather, ”Commodity” 25, 35. Julian Clifton and Chris Majors,
”Culture, Conservation, and Conflict: Perspectives on Marine Pro-tection Among the Bajau of Southeast Asia” 25 Society and Natural Resources 716 (2012).
20Sather, ”Commodity” 36-37.
21Brunt, quoting a workshop participant, 37.
22Ismail Ali, ”Since Birth till Death, What is their Status? A Case
the Orang Suku Laut in Indonesia.23 In this case study, I will also refer from time to time to the parallel experiences of the Moken and Orang Suku Laut.24
A. Boat Nomadism
Until the mid-1950s, Bajau Laut lived almost exclusively in boats, with each family occupy-ing a boat.25 Boats of families would travel the seas, fishing for valuable sea cucumber and other commodities to trade.26 Groups of families would share anchorage points, to which they would return periodically to trade with shore-based peoples and collect fresh water.27 The Bajau Laut were part of vast trading network bringing products like sea cucumber to China. Many families had exclusive trade relationships with Malay patrons from the land-based aristocracy in Borneo in exchange for physical protection. But while the Bajau Laut depended on their patrons for protection, they had a great deal of independence.28 While each Bajau Laut family was in a sense beholden to their patron, the Bajau Laut were free to regulate their internal affairs without interference and also to change patrons as it suited them.29 Nevertheless, having a patron was vitally important in an age of ”endemic violence” on the high seas, and the Bajau Laut were very much integrated the local hierarchy, serving as the first link in a chain of trade stretching to the Imperial Court in Beijing.30
23
Note that while the Moken also suffer from statelessness, the Orang Suku Laut generally do not. See generally Human Rights Watch, ”Stateless at Sea: The Moken of Burma and Thailand” 25 June 2015 at https://www.hrw.or
g/report/2015/06/25/stateless-sea/moken-burma-and-thailand, on the Moken. See generally Walter White, ”Sea Gypsies of Malaysia” (Ams Pri 1922, 1981). See also Cynthia Chou Indonesian Sea Nomads; Money Magic and fear of the Orang Suku Laut Routledge Curzon London and New YOrk 2003, on the Orang Suku Laut.
24
See maps.
25Sather ”Commodity” 27. 26Sather ”Commodity” 27. 27
Sather, ”Commodity” 27. See also Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP 1997) 67.
28Sather, ”Commodity” 27-28.
29Sather ”Commodity” 28-29. See also Clifford Sather, The
Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP 1997) 61.
30Sather ”Commodity” 30. See also Timothy P. Barnard,
”Celates, Rayat-Laut, Pirates: The Orang Laut and Their Decline in History” 80 Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 33 (2007) 34.
B. The Bajau Laut and Territory
The Bajau Laut were not without any sense of territoriality, though the ocean was a shared space. Each family would control a particular moorage point or points, but in general Bajau Laut families would fish in the same general areas, becoming intimately familiar with their geography and resources.31 Though each family would fish mostly within a certain area, they would also from time to time take longer voyages to visit relatives to what is now the Philippines and Indonesia. With the rise and fall of subsequent empires, the Bajau Laut were constantly getting used to new centers of power and shifting boundaries. Anthropologist Cynthia Chou writes of the Orang Laut, a related sea nomad group living around what is now Indonesia, that they view borders as ”temporary markers” that shift along with the changing political realities of the region imposed upon them by outside groups, but that the sea nomads themselves see the region as essentially borderless.32 This migration and lack of fixed resi-dence has led to claims that the Bajau Laut ”do not have a homeland” upon which they could advocate for their traditional sovereignty, unlike land-based groups.33 Regardless of the actual relationship of the Bajau Laut to the areas they inhabit, they are viewed by others in the region as lacking a homeland or fixed connection to one place.
C. The Bajau Laut and Belonging during the Sulu Sultanate
Trade was always the foundation of the econ-omy in southeast Asia, with records of trade with India and China going back to the fifth century, and records of Bajau maritime trade since at least 1,000 BC.34 James Warren refers to the ”Sulu
31Sather ”Commodity” 27. See also Cynthia Chao, The Orang
Suku Laut of Riau, Indonesia: The Inalienable Gift of Territory (Routledge 2010) 10.
32
Cynthia Chou, The Orang Suku Laut of Riau (Routledge 2010) 80.
33Missing the boat? Inside Indonesia, Chris Majors and Joanna
Swiecicka.
34Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Zone” as a ”web of exchange.”35 During the pre-colonial period, the region was a ”free and open migration zone” without fixed political borders or immigration laws, an autonomous region between the areas controlled by the colonial powers of that time: the Dutch and Spanish.36 Borneo was an important locus of trade, and the Bajau Laut formed an integral part of the supply chain.37
Many of Malaysia’s earliest inhabitants were nomadic, with many different groups inhabiting both the Peninsula and Borneo, such as the Orang Asli of peninsular Malaysia.38 More recently, the region that is now divided between Malaysia, Indonesia and the southern Philippines was made up of various Sultanates organized around great trading cities, such as Melacca, Johor and Kuta Raja (Banda Aceh), cities that were closely linked by regional and long-distance trade and family and historical ties.
Today’s maritime borders cut through the an-cient spheres of influence of various Malay king-doms, which were oriented towards the ocean, rather than towards the jungle-covered interiors. These Sultanates did not have territorial borders, but rather ruler-client relationships with various subject groups, including the ”sea nomad” popula-tions in the region. The entire Sultanate could be
35James Francis Warren, The Sulu Zone: 1768-1898 (Singapore
UP 1981). See also James Francis Warren, Looking Back on The Sulu Zone: State Formation, Slave Raiding and Ethnic Diversity in Southeast Asia Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society Vol. 69, No. 1 (270) (1996), pp. 21-33, 23.
36Marshall Clark and Juliet Pietsch, Indonesia-Malaysia
Rela-tions: Cultural heritage, politics and labour migration (Routledge 2014) 158. See also James Francis Warren, Looking Back on The Sulu Zone: State Formation, Slave Raiding and Ethnic Diversity in Southeast Asia Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society Vol. 69, No. 1 (270) (1996), pp. 21-33, 23.
37Philippine-Malaysia Dispute over Sabah: A Bibliographic
Sur-vey Erwin S. Fernandez Department of Filipino and Philippine Literature, University of the Philippines, Diliman 53. See also Lioba Lenhart, ”Recent research on Southeast Asian sea nomads” 36 and 37 Nomadic Peoples 245 (1995) 247.
38Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 12-14. The Orang Suku Laut, sea nomads operating around the Peninsula, had an important relationship with the Malay aristocracy going back hundreds of years and were crucial to the establishment of Johor after Melaka fell to the Portuguese. Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia: Linking East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 72-77. See also Cynthia Chao, The Orang Suku Laut of Riau, Indonesia: The Inalienable Gift of Territory (Routledge 2010) 8.
relocated in times of need.39 This does not mean that the Sultanates had no concept of territoriality, rather that they did not impose strict boundaries.40 Fixed borders would come only with colonialism. On Borneo, the Sultanates of Sulu, centered around the Sulu Sea, and Brunei, centered on northern Borneo, came to be the dominate powers in the region. For many centuries, they prospered off long distance Arab trade in pearls, sea cucum-ber and other sea products, particularly with India and, later, China.41 Over time, Brunei declined and Sulu became more prominent, winning the loyalty of the coastal and nomadic Bajau peoples.42
Trade with China led to a huge increase in demand for sea products, and the rulers of the Sulu Sultanate turned to slave raiding to increase their workforce. Bajau Laut were occasionally em-ployed by other groups not only in the collection of sea products but also as the crew for slaving boats.43
By the end of the eighteenth century, as the Sultanates declined, piracy and slave raiding in the Celebes and Sulu seas increased, dominated by the Illanun peoples, who sometimes employed Samal and Bajau fishermen and sea nomads as crew.44 But as Chao points out, the Malay Sultans differentiated between true piracy and legitimate raiding on behalf of themselves, making the line
39Cynthia Chao, The Orang Suku Laut of Riau, Indonesia: The
Inalienable Gift of Territory (Routledge 2010) 42, 50.
40Malaysia rejected Singapore’s claim that the Sultanate of Johor
did not have a concept of territoriality. See generally International Court of Justice, ”Sovereignty over Pedra Branca/Pulau Batu Puteh, Middle Rocks and South Ledge (Malaysia/Singapore)” 2008.
41Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 61, 62, 80.
42
Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of Malaysia 80.
43Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 113. See also Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP 1997) 36. See also Stefan Eklof, Pirates in Paradise, A Modern History of Southeast Asias Maritime Marauders (Nias Press 2006) 5. See also James Francis Warren, Trade for Bullion to Trade for Commodities and Piracy: Cina, the West and the Sulu Zone, 1768-1898 in Stefan Eklof Amirell and Leos Muller, Persistent Piracy: Maritime Violence and State-Formation in Global Historical Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan 2014).
44Stefan Eklof, Pirates in Paradise, A Modern History of
between raiding and trading somewhat blurry.45 In pre-colonial southeast Asia, the seas around Borneo were less dividers of land masses than they were linkages between trade-oriented city-kingdoms in constant competition with each other for trade and manpower.46 The Bajau Laut, while remaining a great deal of independence, also served the Sultanates as fishermen and crew for raiding ships.47 But the Bajau Laut were always a people apart, separated from the coastal dwelling peoples by their nomadic way of life and ani-mism, able to relocate or change patrons at will.48 Throughout their history, groups of sea nomads have always abandoned boat nomadism when it suited them, merging into the coastal Bajau peo-ples in order to obtain greater status. Other Bajau groups have taken to nomadism to enjoy greater freedom.49 The colonial period, however, was to see the beginning of a long decline in boat no-madism.
D.III. THE COLONIAL PERIOD
With the colonization of the Sulu Sultanate came the beginning of the mass settlement of the Bajau Laut. As Warren puts it, ”(t)heir mobility and independence from the land gave them a practical immunity from government authority...” making their settlement, ”imperative.”50 Warren continues; ”(e)ssential to the establishment of thourough con- trol in the region would be a reorientation of the Bajau toward a surplus productivity involving them in a cash economy and in more sedentary habits.”51
45
Cynthia Chao, The Orang Suku Laut of Riau, Indonesia: The Inalienable Gift of Territory (Routledge 2010) 55. See also Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP 1997)
43-44. See also Timothy P. Barnard, ”Celates, Rayat-Laut, Pirates: The Orang Laut and Their Decline in History” 80 Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 33 (2007) 35.
46This point is made most compellingly by James Warren in ”The
Sulu Zone”. See also Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia: Linking East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 16-17.
47Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia:
Link-ing East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 141.
48CONSCIOUSNESS IN SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: THE
BAJAU LAUT OF EAST MALAYSIA Author(s): Carol Warren Source: Dialectical Anthropology, Vol. 5, No. 3 (NOVEMBER 1980), pp. 227-238 227.
49Lioba Lenhart, ”Recent research on Southeast Asian sea
no-mads” 36 and 37 Nomadic Peoples 245 (1995) 248.
50
Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 77.
51Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company”
77-78.
The British administrators considered the Bajau to be a ”martial,” ”rebellious” people who could not be governed except by their conversion to a settled way of life.52 As I discuss in this section, the colonial powers saw settlement of the Bajau Laut as key to controlling north Borneo, and nomadism became associated with lawlessness and a vacuum in sovereignty.
The Spanish came to the Sulu Sultanate in 1578, conquering the Sultanate in the early 1600s and signing a series of treaties with the Sultan in the mid-1600s and 1700s.53 The Spanish were mainly focused on trade with the Sultanates, however, and large-scale changes to the way of life in Borneo did not begin until the arrival of the British.
In 1824, with the Spanish in decline, the British and Dutch, the latter having by this point gained a foothold in southern Borneo and Sumatra, signed the Anglo-Dutch Treaty dividing southeast Asia into ”spheres”, with the Peninsula in the British ”sphere” and the Indonesian islands in the Dutch ”sphere.”54 No mention was made of Borneo. This treaty set aside centuries of trade and polit-ical unity between the Indonesian islands, includ-ing Sumatra, and the Malaysian peninsula.55 The British slowly set up a system of indirect rule on the Peninsula, similar to their other colonies. Four of the British controlled city-states on the Penin-sula eventually became the Straits Settlements, a Crown Colony, with the capital at Singapore.56 The remaining Peninsular states became British Protected States.57
Meanwhile, northern Borneo was of low priority to the British and, as a result, was not yet under British government control. It slowly came to be within the British ”sphere”, ruled by the ever
52Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company”
106-107.
53
Najeeb M. Saleeby, Studies in Moro History, Law and Religion (Department of the Interior, Philippines, 1905) 164.
54Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia:
Link-ing East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 132. For a detailed description of the subsequent establishment of the border, see Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 49-50.
55Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 125.
56
Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of Malaysia 126. See also Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia: Linking East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 135.
57Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia:
weakening Sultanates of Brunei and Sulu, and came to the attention of various British adventurers looking to make money in southeast Asia.58 The British North Borneo Company (BNBC) signed an agreement with the Sultan of Sulu in 1877, granting control of what is now Sabah to the Company.59 A Chartered Company, the BNBC typified the public-private, semi-military nature of British expansionism of an earlier era, and was an anachronism in the late 1800s, filling a void in the spreading nation-state system that was slowly encompassing the globe.60 The Company had sovereign powers like those of a state, but was unofficial and lacked the resources of a state.61
Next door, James Brooke of England founded Sarawak in 1839, taking over much of the former Brunei Sultanate, which his family ruled as their personal kingdom until the end of World War Two.62 Despite their sweeping claims on maps from the period,63 neither concern had much con-trol over their supposed territory; the BNBC had only three officers in 1882.64 Warren describes the BNBC as ”relatively weak,” but that it nevertheless left a ”profound impression” on the Bajau Laut.65 What control the BNBC and Brooke family did have was based almost exclusively on the coasts, as had been the case for the Sultanates before them, and it was on the coasts that the BNBC and Brooke family began to establish their sovereignty.
Because the British administrators had so little control over the interior, they focused much of their attention on securing British shipping in the area. Ending piracy, by which the British
58South Asia Defence And Strategic Year Book, Colonel Harjeet
Singh 216.
59
Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of Malaysia 188. See also Kevin Young, Willem C. F. Bussink, Parvez Hasan, Malaysia: Growth and Equity in a Multiracial Society (Johns Hopkins UP 1980) 12. See also Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia: Linking East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 131. See also Warren, ”The British North Borneo Company” 33-35.
60Warren, ”British North Borneo Chartered Company 2-3. 61
Warren, ”British North Borneo” 3.
62Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia:
Link-ing East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 109.
63See maps.
64Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate
in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP 1997) 45.
65Warren ”North Borneo Chartered Company” ix.
meant raiding of British ships, became a priority. What the British called ”piracy” in Borneo was often attacks by rival, local traders to some extent sponsored by the Sulu Sultanate, whose income depended on trade that was now being supplanted by the British.66 The British were alarmed by the lack of centralized authority in Borneo, left to its own devises by the weakening Sultanates of Sulu and Brunei, and devistated by the constant attacks by rival groups to control trade.67 The crackdown on piracy and the introduction of a police force made the area safer for settlement and increased trade.68 But the settlement of the Bajau Laut was more than simply an indirect result of the arrival of the BNBC, it was very much a part of a deliberate strategy to stamp out nomadism and encourage settlement.
The reason why the colonialists opposed no-madism was in part because it represented a threat to their sovereignty. The coastal peoples could be taxed, their trade-based economy transitioned to agriculture. But the Bajau Laut were in the habit of decamping to Jolo whenever they were confronted with an authority in Borneo they didn’t like. It was primarily to end these movements and bring the Bajau to heel that the colonial administrators instituted a program of settlement.
Brooke and the BNBC viewed nomadism as practically synonymous with ”piracy”, which was not only a threat to British trade, but a threat to their fledgling sovereignty.69 To end piracy and promote more controllable economic activity, both the BNBC and the Brooke family (as well as the Spanish in Jolo, who were then replaced by the Americans) forced the local communities to transfer from an ocean and trade based economy
66Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 135-136. See also Cynthia Chao, The Orang Suku Laut of Riau, Indonesia: The Inalienable Gift of Territory (Routledge 2010) 55.
67Warren, ”The British North Borneo Company” 44-45. 68Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 45. 69
to agriculture.70 Brooke launched a violent military offensive against ”piracy” in the region,71 and, in the early twentieth century, the BNBC began an anti-piracy program targeting the Bajau peoples.72 While the BNBC and the American authorities claimed ”roving bands of Bajau”, or ”bad hat Ba-jaus”, as one administrator called them, plied the seas and islands between the two powers, attacking outposts and raiding shops, though it is not clear to what extent the Bajau Laut were actually involved in piracy and raiding as opposed to fishing and trade.73 In fact, piracy was dominated mostly by other, shore-based groups.
By the 1840s, the colonial powers had come to dominate the seas around the Peninsula, reducing non-colonial trade, with disastrous results for the local economy.74 The Bajau Laut and Orang Suku Laut were particularly affected.75 The reduction in ”piracy”, by which the British often meant trade and pillage not controlled by themselves, led to a sharp decline in the Sulu Sultanate and a breakdown of the patronage system that has sustained the Bajau Laut for centuries.76
No group in Borneo resisted the BNBC like the Bajau Laut.77 The resistant Bajau Laut were caracturized as ”rebels.”78 They were specifically
70James Francis Warren, Trade for Bullion to Trade for
Com-modities and Piracy: Cina, the West and the Sulu Zone, 1768-1898 in Stefan Eklof Amirell and Leos Muller, Persistent Piracy: Mar-itime Violence and State-Formation in Global Historical Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan 2014) 168-170.
71Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 128-129.
72Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate
in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP 1997) 47.
73Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company”
91-93.
74Stefan Eklof, Pirates in Paradise, A Modern History of
South-east Asias Maritime Marauders (Nias Press 2006) 11. ”Piracy” persisted in the Sulu Sea under the weak Spanish government until the United States gained sovereignty over the Philippines in 1898.
75Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 134-135. See also Timothy P. Barnard, Celates, Rayat-Laut, Pirates: The Orang Laut and Their Decline in History 80 Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (2007), pp. 33-49, 35.
76James Francis Warren, Looking Back on The Sulu Zone: State
Formation, Slave Raiding and Ethnic Diversity in Southeast Asia Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society Vol. 69, No. 1 (270) (1996), pp. 21-33, 30.
77Warren, ”British North Borneo” 4.
78Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 14.
targeted as ”pirates” who were a ”disgrace” to the region, their nomadic way of life seen as a threat to the security of British shipping, British sovereignty against other colonial powers, and agricultural development in the Borneo interior.79 The Bajau in general were seen as too involved with the Sulu Sultanate, loyal to the Sultan and not to the British.80 Settlement of ”sea nomads” was a universally adopted solution to the ”problem” of uncontrolled mobility, and the colonial powers worked to limit the areas in which the ”sea no-mads” could travel.81 This brought to an end the Bajau Laut long distance migrations to what is now the southern Philippines and Indonesia.82 Along with boat licenses and forced settlement, discussed below, movement restrictions began to decrease the numbers of Bajau Laut practicing nomadism.83 Fi- nally, starting in 1909, the BNBC began relocating Bajau villages to more central locations near big towns to contain them and halt their migrations.84 This brought many nomadic Bajau Laut groups into contact with British administration for the first time.85
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the BNBC had begun to gain enough control over the local population that they could begin to put into place a system of indirect rule similar to that in other British colonies. In 1898, the BNBC began to appoint of local leaders and make inroads into the interior.86 With greater control over the interior came greater opportunities for agriculture, which the BNBC wished to promote, shifting the population from a trade-based economy, which the British saw as competition, to agriculture for
79Cynthia Chao, The Orang Suku Laut of Riau, Indonesia: The
Inalienable Gift of Territory (Routledge 2010) 55-58.
80Warren, ”The British North Bornoe Chartered Company” 92. 81Cynthia Chao, The Orang Suku Laut of Riau, Indonesia: The
Inalienable Gift of Territory (Routledge 2010).
82
Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP 1997) 30.
83Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 136.
84
Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 93-94.
85
Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 94.
86Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate
export.
The seafaring Bajau peoples, both nomadic and those based in coastal villages, posed a real chal-lenge to this shift from loosely controlled maritime trade to highly regulated agriculture.87 To justify the settlement of the Bajau Laut, and the relocation and centralization of coastal Bajau, the British administrators described the Bajau way of life as ”wretched”, implying that any change would be an improvement for the Bajau themselves, cast- ing the shift from a maritime-based lifestyle to agriculture as part of their development from a primitive way of life to a modern one.88 Settlement and centralization therefore came to be associated with modernization and economic growth, though as I will explain below, the BNBC’s attempts at agriculture in Borneo were not a success.
The first crop the BNBC attempted in Bor-neo was the coconut tree, which provided the excuse for their first attempt at mass relocation and settlement of the Bajau. The BNBC relocated Bajau peoples, both nomadic and sedentary, from remote islands to the mainland for the planting of coconut trees.89 They cleared the jungles, settling the Bajau peoples and employing them as workers in some of the first large-scale farms in Borneo.90 Settlement of the ”roving” Bajau Laut was not really necessary to obtain workers for the new plantations, as the BNBC also imported Chinese workers for this task. Rather, it was key to shifting the Bajau Laut away from nomadism and ”piracy” to a mode of life that was easier for the colonial administrators to control.91 Carol Warren calls the efforts by the British to settle the Bajau Laut as
87Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia:
Link-ing East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 141. Lioba Lenhart, ”Recent research on Southeast Asian sea nomads” 36 and 37 Nomadic Peoples 245 (1995) 248.
88
Cynthia Chao, The Orang Suku Laut of Riau, Indonesia: The Inalienable Gift of Territory (Routledge 2010) 8.
89Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia:
Link-ing East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 141. See also Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP 1997) 27. See also Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 69.
90
Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP 1997) 47.
91Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate
in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP 1997) 49.
”strenuous”.92 It involved massive manpower and policing to round up scattered villages and flotillas of Bajau peoples and train them to grow coconuts, but the British were undeterred by the difficulties presented.
At first, the Bajau Laut ignored British efforts to settle them for agriculture, but when the United States took over in the Philippines from the weak Spanish administration in 1898, the Bajau Laut could no longer relocate to the southern Philip-pines to escape British policies, and settlement accelerated.93
In a further attempt to crack down on Bajau Laut migration and raise revenue, the BNBC introduced a system of boat registration.94 While not onerous in amount, the Bajau peoples generally viewed this as an impermissible attempt to restrict their free- dom of movement.95 As Sather explains, for most of the first decade of the twentieth century, the BNBC was almost wholly occupied with enforcing boat registration as a means to collect revenue, control ”dangerous” movements, and ”claim” the Bajau Laut as Company subjects against the claims of other colonial powers.96 British agents traveled the islands collecting licenses.97 After considerable resistance, boat registration was finally, grugingly, accepted by the Bajau, which fed the sharp reduc-tion in long distance boat travel.98 Boat registration was relaxed after independence, and then aban- doned, as by that point most Bajau Laut families had settled in ”water villages” near urban centers like Semporna.99
92C. Warren, ”Consciousness” 228.
93Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 79. 94See generally Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered
Company” 79-98. See also Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia: Linking East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 141. See also Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP 1997) 47.
95Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 80. 96
Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP 1997) 47.
97Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 82. 98
Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP 1997) 47. A similar system of boat registration was introduced by the United States in the Philippines.
99Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate
In addition to programs settling the Bajau Laut and restricting their movement, the BNBC also en-couraged settlement through more indirect means. The founding of Semporna Town, for example, was a key moment in the settlement of the Bajau Laut, by providing a center for what had been dispersed trade; a central market for trading all ocean prod- ucts in one place, and providing security in the form of police and, eventually, a navy, the role that had been formally played by the Bajau Laut’s wealthy, settled patrons.100 The British also granted pardon to Bajau who broke the law, as well as convicted pirates, sometimes even releasing them from prison, in exchange for their settlement.101
A. Borders and Sovereignty
As the British administrators of north Borneo began to track and limit the movements of the populations under their control, a process that went hand in hand with developing agriculture, they also sought to impose fixed borders to protect against the incursions of other colonial powers. The notion of nation-states with fixed borders and formal nationality was introduced to southeast Asia during the colonial period.
The new post-colonial states that emerged in Southeast Asia after 1945 inherited the idea of a system of sovereign states with fixed mar-itime and territorial boundaries.102
Borneo and the territories controlled by the Sulu Sultanate and the Brunei Sultanate had been di-vided arbitrarily between vying colonial powers. These arbitrary frontiers between the colonies were to become the borders between modern nation- states. The colonial period therefore marked the beginning of southeast Asia’s division into arbi- trary political units, slicing through former em- pires, including the Sultanate of Sulu, and laying the foundation for a multitude of modern border
100Sather ”Commodity” 38-39. Virginia Matheson Hooker, A
Short History of Malaysia: Linking East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 142. See also Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 66-67.
101Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 83. 102Stefan Eklof, Pirates in Paradise, A Modern History of
South-east Asias Maritime Marauders (Nias Press 2006) 13.
disputes.103
The late 19th and early 20th centuries were dominated by a number of changes of sovereignty in the region, leading to a confusing succession of shifting and unclear borders. Beginning in 1863, Spain gained dominance over the Sultanate of Sulu at Jolo, forcing the Sultan to sign a series of agreements of capitulation, bringing what is now the southern Philippines under Spanish control.104 At the same time, the Netherlands East India Company had established itself in Borneo in the 17th and 18th centuries.105 The 1878 agreement between the British North Borneo Company and the Sultan of Sulu and similar agreements be-tween the Sultan of Brunei and the Brooke family brought northern Borneo into the British sphere.106 Southern Borneo remained under Dutch control.107 In 1891 and again in 1915, the Dutch and British officially established the border between their colonies in Borneo, which became the modern-day border between Malaysia and Indonesia.108 Finally, in 1930, the boundary between north Borneo and the Philippines was fixed by the British and the United States (the latter had taken over what is now the southern Philippines from the Spanish.)
These agreements between colonial powers took no account of the outlines of the traditional ter-ritories of the Sultanates they were replacing, or the social links between peoples on the ground. Today, there are multiple border disputes be-tween Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia due to the complex history of shifting borders and the multitude of historical documents establishing
103These border disputes are discussed in greater detail in the
section on borders after independence, below.
104ICJ, CASE CONCERNING SOVEREIGNTY OVER PULAU
LIGITAN AND PULAU SIPADAN (INDONESIA v. MALAYSIA) (MERITS) Judgment of 17 December 2002
105ICJ, CASE CONCERNING SOVEREIGNTY OVER PULAU
LIGITAN AND PULAU SIPADAN (INDONESIA v. MALAYSIA) (MERITS) Judgment of 17 December 2002.
106ICJ, CASE CONCERNING SOVEREIGNTY OVER PULAU
LIGITAN AND PULAU SIPADAN (INDONESIA v. MALAYSIA) (MERITS) Judgment of 17 December 2002
107Leigh Wright, Historical Notes on the North Borneo Dispute
25 J. of Asian Studies 471 (1966).
108
sovereignty by one or another power at different points in time.109
B. Consolidating the British Malay World
By 1919, the British administrations in Singa-pore and Kuala Lumpur were increasingly look-ing at unitlook-ing the Peninsula territories with the Borneo territories, which had officially become protectorates in 1888, but which remained under the administration of the BNBC and the Brooke family.110 In 1896, the Straits Settlements on the Peninsula, were linked together in a federation, and the British wished to similarly consolidate their other territories in the region.111
Compared with the Peninsula, the British gov-ernment viewed the Borneo territories as law-less backwaters, vulnerable to incursions by other colonial powers.112 This vulnerability was exposed during the Japanese invasion during World War II, when the poorly defended Borneo territories quickly fell to the Japanese, a target because of their recently discovered oil and proximity to shipping lanes. Because of the war, it was not until 1946 that the Borneo territories officially became British colonies.113
During World War Two and Japanese occupa-tion, the nomadic Bajau Laut fled the region to remote islands to escape massacres and forced recruitment. After the war, northern Borneo briefly became a Crown Colony. But already the British were preparing to withdraw and northern Borneo’s colony status was seen as preparation for inde-pendence.114 The allied bombing campaign had destroyed most of the infrastructure in Borneo, and the return of British rule was now cast as a rebuilding period followed by a transition to ”a
109Leigh Wright, Historical Notes on the North Borneo Dispute
25 J. of Asian Studies 471 (1966).
110
Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of Malaysia 207, 241-248.
111Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 185.
112Philippine-Malaysia Dispute over Sabah: A Bibliographic
Sur-vey Erwin S. Fernandez Department of Filipino and Philippine Literature, University of the Philippines, Diliman 53.
113Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia:
Linking East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 217.
114Leigh Wright, Historical Notes on the North Borneo Dispute
25 J. of Asian Studies 471 (1966). See also Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP 1997) 64-65.
unity state”, comprised of all the former British colonies with a single, universal nationality.115 From the beginning, however, both the British and regional elites struggled with the identity of the new country or countries being created out of so many disparate parts.116
C. Economic Development and Settlement
Taxation of the local population represented the major source of revenue for the BNBC, but in order for there to be taxation, there must first be industry.117 The BNBC struggled to make north-ern Borneo a success, trying various cash crops such as tobacco and rubber and eventually turning to timber, beginning the devastation of Borneo’s forests.118 Settlement was a common approach taken by the BNBC to exert greater control over the population, but also to turn a profit out of the territories. The BNBC struggled, however, to make a success of agriculture, and by independence, Borneo’s timber was already running out. The BNBC had some success with tobacco, but timber was only the only truly successful export, and the supply was not inexhaustible.119 The British replaced the traditional system of land tenure to bring more acres under cultivation, but still strug-gled with low productivity.120 The discovery of offshore oil, however, would change everything.
Begun in part to encourage settlement as well as to develop the economy, the rise of agriculture and logging in Borneo also contributed indirectly to Bajau Laut settlement in a number of ways, by introducing the cash economy, wage labor and modern technology. As the Bajau Laut began to settle on pile houses in villages near shore, the old barter system was replaced with a cash economy, and the introduction of the engine and nets gave
115Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia:
Linking East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 181-186.
116Some examples of the ”unity state” include confederation
with Indonesia and the inclusion of Singapore. Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia: Linking East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 209.
117Warren, ”British North Borneo” 3.
118Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 222-225.
119
Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of Malaysia 222-223.
120Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
the Bajau Laut something to buy in the face of growing competition from commercial fishing.121
The Bajau Laut were not the only nomads encouraged or forced to settle. For the nomadic peoples of mainland Borneo, the switch from hunt-ing and gatherhunt-ing to agriculture led to widespread settlement. Crop raising and timber cutting placed pressure on Borneo’s nomadic groups living in the interior, and settlement was actively encouraged by the BNBC.122 In Sarawak, the Brookes granted extensive logging contracts over the objections of nomadic groups, and implemented policies to encourage the nomads to settle and work in the timber industry. The Brooks also encouraged large- scale Chinese migration, greatly increasing the settled population.123
The ”strenuous efforts” of the British admin-istrators in north Borneo to settle the seafaring population, particularly the Bajau Laut, would be continued after independence by the new, post-colonial governments.124 Settlement of nomadic peoples began with colonialism and its need for modern borders and clear sovereignty over Bor-neo’s population, but these concerns would not disappear with independence. In fact, they would become even more important.
For the various colonial administrations in northern Borneo, sea nomadism was seen as a threat to security, particularly the safety of British trade and shipping. To combat ”piracy” and strengthen control over the local population, the various British administrations of northern Borneo promoted settlement and the conversion to agricul-ture.
This period also saw the fixing of borders between colonial powers, laying the foundation for the modern states of Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. As one Company official put it, ”(U)nder British rule, the Bajau is proving himself
121Sather ”Commodity” 32, 38-39. See also Clifford Sather, The
Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP 1997) 67.
122
Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of Malaysia 225.
123Barbara Watson Andaya, Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of
Malaysia 224-225.
124CONSCIOUSNESS IN SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: THE
BAJAU LAUT OF EAST MALAYSIA Author(s): Carol Warren Source: Dialectical Anthropology, Vol. 5, No. 3 (NOVEMBER 1980), pp. 227-238 228.
a good workman, and is building up a permanent home, in place of leading the roving piratical life he was formerly accustomed to.”125
Immigration of Bajau peoples from what had become the Philippines to Borneo began during this time, as Borneo became a regional producer of coconuts and other agricultural products and the war between the United States and the Sultanates of the southern Philippines drove many people to the relative safety of Borneo.126 In the next section, I discuss how immigration would come to dominate identity in Malaysia, with the population split in the popular imagination between deserving ”indigenous” and ”aboriginal” peoples, and an unwelcome influx of ”immigrant” groups. This dichotomy between the suspicious immigrant and the loyal indigenous is central to nationality and belonging in Malaysia today.
D.IV. ”INDIGENOUS” AND ”IMMIGRANT”:
RACE, ETHNICITY, RELIGION AND
BELONGING IN
MALAYSIA
Malaysia has struggled to build a common na-tional identity out of disparate and diverse groups living in territories with very different histories that were united mostly by their intermittent and un- even domination by Britain.127 As Young, Bussink and Hasan put it,
(t)he common status of the myriad peoples of the country is Malaysian citizenship, but it takes more than this shared status to transcend the separate identities of diverse cul-tures.128
Malaysia today is usually described as being made up of three nationalities/ethnic groups: Malays and other ”indigenous” peoples, and two ”immigrant” populations: Chinese and Indians.129 The actual
125Leonard Lovegrave, Royal Society of Arts, London, quoted in
Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 86.
126Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate
in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP 1997) 54. See also Warren, ”The British North Borneo Chartered Company” 67, 83, 87.
127Kevin Young, Willem C. F. Bussink, Parvez Hasan, Malaysia:
Growth and Equity in a Multiracial Society (Johns Hopkins UP 1980) 11.
128Young, Bussink and Hasan 11.
129Lim Hong Hai Electoral Politics in Malaysia: Managing
history of ethnicity in the region, however, is complicated by multiple cycles of immigration and migration in an area dominated by long-distance, seafaring trade since the beginning of recorded history by Arab, European and Chinese traders.130 Islam was introduced to the region in the 15th century and served as the unifying force in Malay society before the introduction of modern national- ity, and the spread of Islam enabled the rise of the Sultanates. But many of the Borneo peoples are not Muslims, nor are many members of the ”im- migrant” Chinese and Indian communities.131 In fact, there is no common ethnic, cultural, religious or linguistic trait unifying all of Malaysia, apart from the recently created Malaysian nationality. As a result, subsequent Malaysian governments have struggled to keep the federation together, and have placed a premium on creating a common identity. The concepts of race and nationality were both introduced during the colonial period. Belonging in the Sultanates was very much based on loyalty to the person of the Sultan, and most peoples enjoyed considerable autonomy as long as they fulfilled their service to the Sultan. The people inhabiting Sabah and Sarawak are culturally and linguistically similar to the people inhabiting what is now the southern Philippines and northern Indonesia, cre- ating a great deal of continuity between the peoples of what is now Sabah, Sarawak, Indonesia and the southern Philippines.132 The European concept of a racial ”nation” as the basis of the state therefore does not easily align with the diverse Federation that is now Malaysia. In this section, I discuss in greater detail how the concepts of ”immigrant” and ”indigenous” came to be defined in the Malaysian context.
A. Immigration and the Invention of ”Race” in Malaysia
During British rule, the 1840s and 1850s saw large populations of foreign workers brought to
130Sinnadurai 311. 131
Najeeb M. Saleeby, Studies in Moro History, Law and Religion (Department of the Interior, Philippines, 1905) 158. See also Sinnadurai 312.
132Clifford Sather, The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate
in a Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah (Oxford UP 1997) 21-23.
the Malay peninsula from India, China and In-donesia to work on the rubber plantations.133 With the beginning of British dominance and the more recent influx of immigrants came the concept of classifying the peoples of Malaysia by ”race”. The complexities of ethnicity in Malaysia can be seen in the ongoing struggles over the cen-sus, introduced by the British in 1871 in what was then known as the ”Straits Settlements” of Peninsular Malaysia, which included most of the Peninsula’s major trading cities.134 Originally, the censuses classified peoples by nationality, but later the British started employing the term ”race” in line with their own thinking about the classification of peoples, but based on the idea of an indige- nous group of ”Malays” and various immigrant communities that had been brought, or encouraged to immigrate, to the Malay world by the British in the recent past.135 Early censuses included the indigenous peoples of Borneo in the category of ”Malay”, but later a separate category of ”abo- riginal peoples” was created.136 These categories, however, did not reflect the enormous diversity of the pre-colonial population, which had already incorporated various peoples from all over the region. As well, the classifications of the peoples of Malaysia by race was complicated by the fact that Malaysians themselves thought more in terms of religious affiliation than ”race.”137 In Sabah, Islam is closely associated with being ”Malay”.138 Like race, the concept of nationality was brought to Malaysia by the British, who created the first nationality laws on the Peninsula (discussed below
133Charles Hirschman, ”The Meaning and Measurement of
Eth-nicity in Malaysia,” 46 Journal of Asian Studies 555 (1987), 558.
134Over the course of the late 19th century and early 20th century,
the British expanded census taking to include all the territories in Peninsular Malaysia, both ”federated” and ”un-federated” states, all of which were semi-autonomous British protectorates ruled, at least nominally, as hereditary Sultanates. By the 1930s, the census had expanded to include the Borneo territories. Hirschman 559.
135Hirschman 566-568. 136
Hirschman 563. See also Yekti Maunati, Networking the Pan-Dayak in Wendy Mee and Joel , Questioning Modernity in Indonesia and Malaysia (Nus Press 2012) 97, discussing the use of the term ”Dayak” to apply to Borneo’s ”non-Malay natives.”
137
Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia: Linking East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 21. See also Hirschman 565.
138
in the next section.) But Malaysia the federa-tion came into being only upon independence, and Malaysian national identity was very much something that had to be built by the Malaysian government, as a group of only loosely related, independent territories were forged into a single political unit.139 Nationality and its relationship to race is a complex topic in modern Malaysia, as the government has made various attempts to equate nationality with the Malay ”nation”, but more recently has moved to a strategy of multi-culturalism, with nationality serving as a sort of common, civil identity entirely separate from race. Malaysia’s first prime minister saw nationality laws as the key to forging a common national identity in a country where 50 percent of the population was non-ethnic Malay, while simulta-neously seeking to preserve Malay identity as the core of Malaysian identity.140 This somewhat con-tradictory policy would never quite work, leaving Malaysia with a contradictory policy towards race and nationality.
The governments of Malaysia have carried on and continued to develop the concept of racial classification in Malaysia based on the founding principle of a core group of ”indigenous” Malays, who are Malaysia’s ”true” nationals, and various categories of ”immigrants” who are racially dif-ferent. As a result, the Chinese, Indian and Eu-ropean ”immigrant” populations have always been counted separately in the census, whereas Malays and the various ”aboriginal” peoples are often counted together.141 But the government has strug-gled, as the British did, with this system of clas-sification. Since independence, the term ”Orang Asli”, or ”original peoples” has often been used for the ”aboriginal” peoples, but usually only with regards to indigenous peoples on the Peninsula.142 Non-Malays in the Borneo states are frequently referred to as ”Kadazan”, or sometimes ”Dusun”, whereas Malay and ”aboriginal” non-Malays in Malaysia as whole are often referred to as
”Bu-139Chea Boon Kheng, ”Malaysia: The Making of a Nation”
(Institute of Southeast Asian Studies 2002).
140
Cheah Boon Kheng
141Hirschman 562-564.
142Hirschman 563. Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of
Malaysia: Linking East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 23.
miputera”, or ”sons of the soil.”143 During the late colonial period, Kadazan nationalism in Borneo emerged, and the Borneo states have periodically pushed for more independence, citing how their histories and cultures are very different from that of the Malays.144 The umbrella term Bumiputera, therefore, masks significant differences between Malays and ”aboriginal” groups like the Bajau Laut or Orang Asli. Non-Malay groups in Borneo are frequently Christian and animist, whereas a large part of Malay identity is with Islam, a fact that the ”bumiputera” category does not take into account.145
Eventually, the term ”race” has been aban-doned on the census in favor of ”community” or ”ethnicity”, in order to promote a unified, ”Malaysian” identity.146 But the classification of Malaysia’s peoples remains contentious. The gov-ernment banned discussion of ethnic classification in Malaysia following violent riots in the 1960s, and the sensitivity over the subject continues.147 In 2000, the census listed over 65 percent of the population as ”bumiputera”, whereas the rest fell into ”immigrant” categories of one sort or
143Fausto Barlocco, Identity and the State in Malaysia (Routledge
2014) 34. See also Frederik Holst, Ethnicization and Identity Construction in Malaysia (Routledge 2012) 33. See also Lim Hong Hai Electoral Politics in Malaysia: Managing Elections in a Plural Society 102. See also Lim Hong Hai Electoral Politics in Malaysia: Managing Elections in a Plural Society 102. The creation of the bumiputera category was specifically designed to bond peninsular Malays with the ”native” populations of the Borneo territories, whereas the inclusion of the Orang Asli peoples of the Peninsula remains ambiguous. See Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia: Linking East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 227.
144
Fausto Barlocco, Identity and the State in Malaysia (Routledge 2014) 43.
145A History of Malaysia 341. Marshall Clark and Juliet Pietsch,
Indonesia-Malaysia Relations: Cultural heritage, politics and labour migration (Routledge 2014) 162. Programs included quotas, promo- tion of Malay language education and a special bank for bumiputera, as well as land reform. See Goh Beng Lan, Dilemma of Progressive Politics in Malaysia: Islamic Orthodoxy versus Human Rights in Wendy Mee and Joel Kahn, Questioning Modernity in Indonesia and Malaysia (Nus Press 2012) 302-306, 342.
146Hirschman 566. See also Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short
History of Malaysia: Linking East and West (Allen and Unwin 2003) 233.
147Virginia Matheson Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia:
